ECG worked with the academic-affiliated children’s hospital to improve the referral process and access to care pertaining to its outpatient programs.
Children’s Health (CH) is a 600‑bed, academic-affiliated children’s hospital whose outpatient clinics focus on subspecialized and high-acuity care provided by the faculty of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. Children’s Medical Center Dallas was ranked in all 10 pediatric subspecialties by U.S. News & World Report in 2022–2023.
By using Epic tools, redesigning provider templates, and optimizing nonclinical workflows, ECG’s efforts helped the pilot programs increase their average session durations and templated slots per session, adding over 160 net-new slots per month for each program and increasing urology provider utilization by 11%. The standardized templates enabled online scheduling for new and established patients, introducing a digital entry point for consumers. The methodology has since been rolled out to nearly all specialties. In addition, CH used the workflows created by ECG to standardize the referral process to provide a consistent experience for patients and their families across all specialties.
ECG’s provider capacity analysis helped CH understand the variations in patient contact hours and slot count across the organization. The urology program used this information to increase session duration for 50% of provider templates, while the orthopedics group expanded 81% of its templated sessions. The analysis enabled CH to prioritize other programs for optimization based on access trends, volume, and productivity outcomes and provided a framework for robust policies and procedures regarding provider templated time.
